Wired is a fashion magazine
Sep 29, 04:01
My current subscription situation involving Wired is almost accidental is nature- you see, I attended NextFest and it was sort of a consolation prize for surrendering a twenty to get in. I have received three monthly issues so far, and I must admit my general level of satisfaction with the arrangement, despite its apparent financial justifications, has been remarkably low. I have been disappointed by each and every edition I have spent time with. At first I even considered it might be something about me that made the magazine suck in such a wholesale fashion. Nope.
I had originally thought Wired was a periodical focused on technology, but this was based almost entirely on hearsay and the category it was listed under on my sister’s PTO fundraising flyer. I became aware of my serious err in judgement rather quickly upon inspection of an actual issue. And what a sight to behold! Articles riddled with little lies even a semi-power-user could detect easily! Fanciful predictions of the upcoming developments in user interface design! Holy shit another Hollywood remake! The much-ballyhooed ‘Cool/UnCool’ section (OK the name is actually ‘Wired/Tired’ but it’s just as lame a name/concept regardless), and WHAT IS THIS but an article about a hard drive crash.
Excuse me but this little rant deserves its own paragraph. Everyone knows hard drives crash, they do it all the time, it’s practically their hobby. But here we have an article, albeit a small one, about some rapper who almost lost his magical rhymes because a portable hard disk crapped out unexpectedly. This is not news. It is not even close enough to elicit any kind of notice, especially in a technology magazine. Even if, for some perverse reason, it just had to be included in that section of otherwise indispensable knowledge, it could have been summed up in a single concise sentence: Drama ensues when idiot gets caught neglecting his backups. There. Moving on.
I suppose I should have known right from the start: No respectable periodical on technology runs ads for alcoholic beverages, let alone expensive vodka, luxury cars, or a trendy clothing outfitter that isn’t so subtly named in what I’d like to think was a reference to the sweatshop labor it employs. Real tech mags have ads for tape backup systems, microscopes, and useless personal electronic devices. Wired has that last one covered you say? Perhaps they did get one thing right. But that is all.
What Wired does do is focus on famous people and how they can sometimes be ‘high-tech’ or on the periphery of other semi-newsworthy things that actually are. It’s a fashion magazine that happens to be concerned with how rich people might be superficially interested in technology, but only as far as it might help keep the ‘I’m rich and I’m down with the future’ image alive. Not only do I have no need for such frivolous usage of paper and ink, I have no time to squander trying to figure out whether or not some lame ass mainstream movie effects or software update interest me in the slightest.
I seriously get more relevant tech news reading the comments at Slashdot.
The newest issue has King Kong and Jack Black on the cover.